Solana will begin delivering its web-3 focused smartphone- Saga, on 20th April for everyone who pre-ordered and for everyone else after May 8, the network’s developers announced during the official launch of the device Thursday.
The $1000 flagship device comes with a 6.67-inch OLED display and 512 GB of storage. It also features a fingerprint unlock that can be used to verify and sign crypto transactions.
Although the phone has all the features of conventional smartphones, it has a splash of Web 3 integrations which include a built-in mobile wallet adapter and a seed vault that can import seed phrases from other crypto wallets or create new ones. It also has a Solana dApp Store where users can find apps for web3 platforms such as wallets, DeFi apps, NFT apps, social apps, and the dApp workspace. It also has a physical seed phrase paper card to access the crypto wallet.
According to Solana’s co-founder and CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, these features make the phone as close to a hardware wallet as possible, offering the best mobile app experiences for Web-3 users.
“There’s something magical that happens when you combine both of those things. The Web 3 applications in the App Store all share the same seed wallet identity. You no longer have this like 50-page menu to pick which wallet to connect with which app. All of this is automatically recognized by the operating system. All of this is seamless and that’s an awesome experience for users and this is what crypto should be like,” said Yakovenko
Steven Laver, the engineering lead at Solana Mobile, further noted that the phone’s infrastructure connects dApps to wallets, similar to how MetaMask has a connect button on its desktop client.
When the phone is released to the public in the next two weeks, Solana hopes to add more applications to the dApp store. Saga owners will also receive $20 worth of USDC and 0.01 SOL as part of the dApp store welcome pack, including an airdropped Saga genesis token that provides access to rewards offered by dApps.
Yakovenko announced Saga’s launch last June, noting that he thought “it’s time for crypto to go mobile”. At the term, he noted that they hoped to make crypto products and services more accessible to users by offering them through a phone instead of the traditional way of accessing crypto platforms via computers. Although the phone was set to launch in Q1 2023, deliveries were pushed to Q2 for further software updates.
The Saga phone is now expected to compete with other smartphones, which allow users to download and store their digital assets in crypto wallets. According to Laver, the phone is already certified for sale in over 30 countries, with plans to expand to more in the long term.
